


hope brighter than the winter stars

by Nautica_Dawn



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Mental Health Issues, i have absolutely no idea how to tag this, it's there if you squint, not overtly romantic, or romantic at all really, some discussion of trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 21:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20954933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nautica_Dawn/pseuds/Nautica_Dawn
Summary: Once upon a time, he'd said that all he wanted was a pretty girl and the freedom to shoot lightning at fools. Then came Justice, and Kirkwall, and a tiny cave he was dumped in when someone went and tore a hole in the Veil. And after, well, that's another story.





	hope brighter than the winter stars

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“ _ Asha’lan’athle’an sulena eir’melana’bel’annar _ ,” someone sings nearby, her voice echoing rough in the cave. He must be dreaming; there’s been no one here save him for months now.

The dream is snowy white, snows made living, snow woman singing. Snow woman. His grandmother told a story of a snow woman, once. Said they sucked the life out of living men. He thinks this snow woman, ghostly white and wrapped in magic, might just suck the life from him.

She’s so close, so familiar, so otherworldly beautiful. Washed out white, hair dragging like frost across the world. Elvhen,  _ eir’asha _ , the little words his grandmother murmured when no one was around. 

She leans in close, and his world goes white.

.

.

.

He wakes up cold, alone. So, so alone. Years and years he’s felt the murmur beneath his skin, justice twinned with darkness, blue and black. But now silence crushes against the inside of his skull, and his skin feels too big for his bones. This place is darkly frozen, and Eir’asha wanders pale through shadow.

He thinks he ought to know her.

.

.

.

Strength seeps back in fits and bits. Eir’asha visits every day, snow for water and foraged bits to eat that make him wonder if she’s real at all. 

The time in the dark leaves him to think, and oh how his mind wanders. 

The absence of justice is nothing. 

Oblivion. 

The absence of darkness is nothing. 

More oblivion. 

He thinks of all he was, of all that’s gone, and how he never dreamed oblivion would be white. 

.

.

.

“Ahn mar melin?” she asks. She’s not yet spoken, till now, eir’asha that is. She’d sung in a rough voice, cracked and broken, but not spoken. Eir’asha speaks far sweeter than she sings. She hovers at the edge of his oblivion, frail and pale, as lovely and out of touch as the moon. “U’ishan, ahn mar melin?”

“I don’t—” his throat hurts. Too much cold. He tries to swallow around it and wonders if she’s fed him glass in the snow. “I don’t speak Elven. Just bits.”

She’s quiet for a sucked in moment. “Your name?”

_ Your name _ . Lilted up, like a question. Lilted, like his own voice, like  _ Kinloch _ . He sits up as best he can, and looks at her fully. “I know you, don’t I.”

It’s not a question. But it is a question. Eir’asha tilts her head ‘til her hair all falls to her left. So much hair, moonlight pooled at her feet. “No.”

And then she’s gone. 

.

.

.

Eir’asha’s palace is a place of ice and stone and winter white skies as far as he can see. Eir’asha herself blinks in and out of reality as easily as he breathes. He finds her here and there, and sometimes not at all, once he’s up and moving. 

There’s no one in this place but him and her, but cold and silence.

Oblivion, indeed. 

.

.

.

“I don’t have a name,” he tells her in the gardens. Thorns and twisted branches, the only flowers he sees are whorls of frost. “I lost it long ago.”

“Halla’asha’lan,” she says. “They call me Halla’asha’lan.”

“But that’s not a name,” he says. “I may not speak Elven, but I still know a bit.”

“No.”

He sighs. She’s standing in the middle of the garden, haunting the grounds. She’s barefoot, barely clothed in thin white fabric, snow white hair falling like a cloak around her as it drags along the ground. She belongs here, but also doesn’t. He knows her, but cannot place the washed out woman before him. An elven woman with moonlight hair and frozen sea eyes; he’d think he would clearly remember someone like her. 

But Eir’asha defies the world. 

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” and this time it’s a question. “Not when I was dreaming. In life, we’ve met.”

“Maybe.”

“Can you say anything more than a few words at a time?” he asks, and regrets it. Eir’asha is elven, old elven. The kind his grandmother whispered stories about. Old magic and older memories. Dangerous things, they are. “Apologies.”

“No,” she says, careful. He can see her lips round around the word, barely pink amid the white. 

She says  _ no _ , and walks away, moonlight trailing after her. 

.

.

.

She’s a mage, is the snow woman, but different in that he’s never seen magic like hers. She casts easy as can be, and twirls long complicated tendrils of made-up spells in the air. She’s started bringing him better food, even if he can’t name everything she puts before him. He wonders how she does it, finding fresh meat and vegetables in this everwinter place. 

The deeper shadows whisper secrets. She twists and twirls the spells, magic made sinew and bone, blood and breath. 

Eir’asha makes him a cat. 

.

.

.

“How did you do this?” he asks. The kitten is perfect, near as he can see. Downy white fur, little pink nose, shining blue eyes. Winter white, just like its maker. There are four paws, and all the right bits, and he casts his own magic over it trying to find a fault. 

There isn’t any.

“This isn’t possible,” he tells her. “You can’t just make life like this.”

Eir’asha just looks at him. He thinks she’s going to leave again. 

“Mamae did the same,” she says, finally. “Mamae made monsters, so Mama could hunt.”

It’s the most she’s said to him yet. He looks at her, curled up on on a ledge, wrapped in white and pillowed on her hair dripping down. If she were anywhere else, she’d look like a girl barely out of childhood. He’d think her young, but Eir’asha is elven, and elves can be very old and very young all at once.

“Why?”

“Mama needed better prey.”

He shakes his head. The cat curls warm against his body. Warm, so warm, so  _ alive _ . “No, why make this?’

Eir’asha blinks slow. 

She doesn’t answer. 

He names the cat Snowball. 

.

.

.

She’s gone a lot, Eir’asha is. She lets him wander the frozen snowscape she inhabits, save the highest tower of her palace. He finds fresh clothes—always dark blues and pale silver, he notices later, like she’s acknowledging his history as a Warden when no one ever seemed to rightly remember his Warden days—and a warm bath every day, with food for man and cat alike at the garden table. There’s even a kit for shaving and a new pair of boots nicer than any he’s ever seen before.

He’s fairly certain he’s dead. For all the warmth emanating off Snowball’s tiny body, for the tiny heartbeat he can hear and for his own steady heartbeat, he feels no chill despite the abundance of ice around him. There’s no end to the winter around them, and he cannot see the ground that should lie below the palace. 

If he were alive, that is. Dead; floating palaces and ancient mythological elven women are certainly a possibility. 

He hears things, sometimes. Scratching, footsteps, heavy creatures moving in the shadows. Dark forms soaring through the mists. Voices that echo, maybe animal, maybe not. Almost like the Fade.

He must be dead, he decides. There’s no spirit sharing headspace and murmuring violent justice in his mind. There’s no crawling taint along his spine to remind him how mortal he really is.

Dead, yes, because alive there has never been a future for him. 

.

.

.

_ A pretty girl and the freedom to shoot lightning at fools _ , he’d once said. Now he’s got the freedom, there’s a pretty—albeit creepy—girl, and a distinct lack of fools.

If this is being dead, it kind of bites. Justice could at least be counted on for conversation, in a pinch. And he is, despite surviving more solitary confinement than anyone should ever face, a very social man. 

“Snowball, do you know where I might find some company?” he asks, leaning back against a bare-branched tree. The cat doesn’t even deign to look up at him. 

“I wonder how they’re doing?” 

His death must have come for him in the night. He remembers a cave, darkness, and a snow woman silhouetted against his dreams. He remembers the embers of his future burning through Kirkwall, death and destruction as his legacy. Maybe now that he’s gone, they’ll remember him for freedom. Maybe. 

He left the Circle through a cave, left the Wardens through a cave made of battle and tragedy, left Kirkwall through Darktown’s caves.

Hawke left him in a cave, when the whispering started. Justice knew it for the Calling and shielded him as best as possible. But it brought him low, all the same, sapped his strength and the lack of will he found in that cave put him in delium. He thinks that must have been when death came, and the lovely snow woman came to claim his soul. 

The cat offers no answers.

“I didn’t think so,” he murmurs, and leans back against the tree until he can see the branches twisting up towards the silver-white sky. Snowflakes flutter by, just a few. They started—no, he lost track. Day in and day out, this place doesn’t change.

“Time makes no sense here,” he tells no one in particular. 

.

.

.

“Ena’eir’man,” Eir’asha says to him, the next he sees her. It’s breakfast and she’s sitting across from him, Snowball in her lap like they do this every day. “It’s Shi’vun’in, the first of Ena’eir’man.”

He pauses over his food. She has none, of course, and she’s said nothing since sitting down until now. “I don’t speak Elven, remember? You’ll have to translate.”

“Wednesday, the first of Firstfall,” she says. She looks up through delicate frost lashes. “There’s a calendar in the library.”

He nearly drops his spoon. “Library?” 

She nods.

“Where?” he asks. “I’ve been all over and haven’t seen a library once.” 

She nods again. “After breakfast,” she tells him.

_ Library _ is the understatement of the Age. He turns around; it’s like an entire second palace of glittering silver glass halls filled floor to ceiling with more books than he thought possible. He hasn’t been this far towards the lower palace before. Eir’asha’s home is built from a lower hanging section to a series of towering spires, and now he is certain that they are floating. The floor of the library is translucent, a swirling image below like water that parts on occasion to show nothing but air and distant mountain peaks running into a churning frozen sea far below. 

It’s mildly disconcerting, but the  _ books _ . 

“Where did you get all of these?” he asks. 

Eir’asha shrugs, an almost  _ human _ motion for the wraith. “Everywhere. Life without books is too dull.”

She sounds almost alive, like this. Almost  _ real _ . He takes a good long look at her, and how there’s been more colour in her skin since she returned this last time, a sharpness in her eyes like she’s actually here. Her hair has been freshly detangled, he thinks, and the silvery robes are fitted and fine in a way he hasn’t seen before.

Something’s changed, he thinks.

“Life?” he asks. “That matters in death?”

Eir’asha makes a face, pinched like she’s bitten something bitter. “Tel’ar din,” she says.

He hasn’t the foggiest what that means, and she doesn’t offer a translation. 

She’s gone again by morning. 

.

.

.

He takes to sleeping in the library. Both good and bad, that; good because he won’t get lost this way and Snowball seems to like it. Bad because the shadows he’s seen in the sky apparently roost around this lower section of the palace. 

The first he sees one, he’s wandered into a new section of the library, where one wall is dominated by something like glass and offering a lovely view of the palace’s underside. 

Well, lovely and disrupted. Snowball sees it first, batting away at the glass while he reads. He’d not noticed the movement, but looking over at where the kitten plays, he sees the swinging tail. 

It’s feathered, but not like any he’s seen before. Black, the only true black he’s seen in this place save the deepest nighttime shadows, but iridescent with a silvery-blue like dawn lotus. He wanders over and follows the tail up to see a body covered in the same feathers. 

And it isn’t alone. 

The entire underside of the palace is a rocky thing that’s been colonised by whatever monster his cat seems to find amusing. And monster it is. It looks vaguely like a swan, if a swan were many times larger than a qunari and equipped with the avian answer to siege weaponry. The beaks are sharper than his scalpels, and he’s not sure he’s ever seen a swan with talons, let alone talons quite like that. The feathers are a remarkable thing too, he thinks, taking a closer look at the tail swinging against the glass. The dawn lotus glimmer comes from what looks like tiny blades at the edges of the feathers.

Fascinating, terrifying creatures. He wonders if Eir’asha made them the way she made Snowball. But what chills him the most is that there are  _ hundreds _ of them. 

.

.

.

Eir’asha’s monsters sing. It’s not a birdsong he knows, and their voices are far more pleasant than hers. He can hear them echo through the library, now that he’s matched the song to the creature. Sometimes they’re in the gardens, soaring overhead. He can pick them out from the faint echoes in the mists. Some, he thinks, is simply wind and mountain song twinned with the sea’s voice, far below the Palace of Oblivion. 

He learns to almost like their dreamlike song, and after seeing one of the great beasts soar up through the clouds with an august ram in its beak, he’s learned to actually appreciate the monsters. 

And when that ram shows up as a lovely dinner for him, he tries to not think of the hunter who felled it. 

.

.

.

It’s in the deepest recesses of the library, the chambers built of open platforms and invisible perimeter wards—he tried jumping, just to see, and promptly bounced backwards onto his arse. Snowball and the monster birds seem to know instinctively to avoid the wards, and he’s fairly certain they were laughing at him—that hang below the main body of the library and are exposed to wind and clouds alike, that he finds it. 

The space itself is lovely, all opaque frozen sea ice and whispering curtains made of frost and mist billowing in the winds. There’s soft places to sit, the furniture looking like it were spun of clouds. 

He never will get over the architecture and construction of this place, he thinks, and drops himself into the softest chair he can find that’s within arm’s reach of a bookshelf. For a moment he just sits. From here, the song of the swan monster is crystal clear, as is the scratching of their movements on the stone above him. 

It’s almost peaceful. 

He’s about to reach out for a book when something catches his eye. Not all of Eir’asha’s books are in the best condition, which makes him think she salvages more than anything. And  _ this _ . It’s battered and familiar, just like the copy in Kinloch. He leans forward to reach it, and it’s been years and years since he last held Kinloch’s copy, but the Maker can smite him if this isn’t the exact same book. 

He flips to the back pages, just to double check. 

.

.

.

Eir’asha next returns when the snows are near-constant, and the darkness deeper than ever. By his estimates and the Elven calendar in the library, he’s guessing it’s sometime near the beginning of true winter when he finds her in one of those hanging reading rooms. 

He hold the book out where the last page is visible. “Where did you get this?”

“I always liked that,” she says, and it’s now he sees the flush in her cheeks is stronger than ever. And she’s grinning, Eir’asha is, just a subtle ghost of a vicious smile that sends chills down his spine. He forgets, sometimes, that she is dangerous. “I always wondered what became of Ser-Pounce-A-Lot. That’s the only one I ever found.”

“Because it’s the only one to exist,” he says. “The rest—Maker,  _ why _ do you have this? I left this in Kinloch Hold.”

“And I took it.”

“Obviously,” he says, gesturing to the book again. The child’s drawing of a tiger eating templars is so bright, despite the age. Even upside down, he can see the early beginnings of his current handwriting. “Why? Have you been haunting me? Watching me from the Fade?”

She’s got that bitter look back, and it’s such a different expression when she’s so intently focused on him like this. “Tel’ar din,” she repeats, and still offers no translation. “I didn’t know who made the drawing. I found the book in Swan’s things and I liked it. That’s it.”

Her Common is getting better, he notes, or it was always this good, maybe. She sounds so much like Kinloch it makes his teeth ache. If only he could place her and this Swan. It’s so familiar. He knows he’s heard that before, that he has seen the snow woman before him a different setting. 

But he cannot place it, cannot place her. 

“You were at Kinloch,” he tries, “weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

He almost misses it. It wasn’t quiet, but spoken plainly. 

_ Yes _ . 

Eir’asha was at Kinloch Hold, obviously. She has the book, so of course she was there. “I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” she says, cuts him off. “I was at Kinloch. Just as you were. Just as Swan was. I remember Greagoir and Irving, Wynne and Ines. I was there.”

.

.

.

Eir’asha avoids him, after that. At least, he assumes it is avoidance. He’s there and she’s there, but she pays him no mind. He knows she’s there; she haunts the palace just at the edges of his awareness. He catches sight of her here and there.

But she never turns when he calls after her.

.

.

.

Winter does mean something here, he finds. In time the snows are incessant night and day. And night it is. Pitch dark, with storm clouds so thick the moon is wiped from the sky. 

Eir’asha may be ignoring him, but at least she leaves him candles and oil lamps. 

.

.

.

The solstice comes. 

He spends it with Snowball in the library. 

Not even the monsters stir, that night, like they know there’s something in the air. He sees creatures he’s never spotted before. They haunt the library, but without danger. It’s something else, something like  _ fear _ . 

He doesn’t know enough to properly fear, but he knows the metallic taste in the air and the spark in the wind that whispers something wicked this way comes. It’s anticipation, this is. Anticipation for something big and world-shaking. He can feel it coursing over his skin. Eir’asha is here, he thinks. She’s somewhere here and she’s become the monster who stalks the night. 

The solstice goes.

.

.

.

The nights grow shorter, and in time the snowstorms stop. 

Eir’asha spends less time in the palace, once true winter fades.

He thinks of the solstice, of the fear in the air, and wonders at how the palace is even lonelier, now. 

.

.

.

“I’m sorry,” he says, the next time he catches her close enough. It’s in the gardens, where she’s twisting some spell into sinew and bone. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You didn’t,” she says. She doesn’t halt the spell, and he can see she’s building something violent.

“Do you often do this?” he asks. Her magic twists, forms silverite morningstar teeth. “Making creatures like this?”

“Hunters,” she corrects. “I am no huntress, so I make hunters to serve me.”

“And this one?”  
Eir’asha grins proper, and it’s a chilling sight. “Swan hunting.”

He doesn’t ask.

.

.

.

It isn’t until Wintersend he works up the courage to ask after Justice and the taint. He’s researched as much as he can in the library, but there’s been little on such things, bar a handful of Avvar studies. 

And, well, he’d assumed Justice was as permanent as the taint. 

Eir’asha looks at him with eyes distant and glassy. “He made you loud,” is all she says. 

“Loud?” 

“Loud,” she repeats, nodding sagely. She’s not looking at him, he realizes. She often doesn’t. She’s looks  _ through  _ him, instead. “You’re not. You’re quiet, like Swan, but warm like autumn. He made you loud.”

“And the taint?”

She frowns. “He took it, even knowing.”

“Knowing—” he starts, stops. He’s found this answer in the library, already. Not even demons wander where the Blight has scorched the earth, and the taint afflicts the Fade just as it twists the mortal realm. “Oh.” 

“He believed in you,” Eir’asha says absently. “I went to save him, but he asked that I save you instead.”

.

.

.

That night, when he finds a Chantry mourning candle by his bed, he doesn’t question it. There’s just a bit of relief, that she’s recognized how much Justice meant, and how much that final request means.

It takes a week for him to register the  _ save him _ part. 

.

.

.

“You’re not dead?” he guesses, and then follows. “And not me, either?”

She nods again and takes a step closer to him. Then another, and another, until she’s standing right before him. This close, she’s tiny, skinny enough he could hide her behind him without any issue, but she’s rather taller than he’d thought, as she stands up straight. That tickles something at the back of his mind, a dusty memory he can’t quite recall. 

Eir’asha takes his hands and her skin is cold but in the way a living being’s sometimes is. Poor circulation, the doctor still in him says. She puts one hand on his chest, right over his heart where he can faintly feel the beat beneath his clothes. The other she places over her own heart, and her own steady heartbeat. 

“Alive,” she says, “like me.”

He’s alive. He spends the next few weeks in a kind of daze. He’s  _ alive _ . Not dead, alive, and Eir’asha is as real as he is. The creatures she makes, even Snowball chasing after snowflakes in the garden, are  _ real _ . 

Which means the floating palace and insane magic are all  _ real _ . There’s a headtrip. It means Eir’asha is not a spirit, not a myth, not a legend. No more than Hawke was, at least. 

She’s a living breathing woman. 

That fact causes more stress than it probably should. 

.

.

.

She’s so fair, Eir’asha is. He finds himself staring at her without meaning to. It’s in the delicate movement of her wrists, and the casual bareness of her ankles. Sometimes she’s close enough he can see her veins. He wonders if her blood is just as luminous pale as the rest of her, and then promptly steers his thoughts into less macabre places. 

But less macabre is more the kind of wondering a younger him might have entertained. Controlled lightning arcing over her skin, a trail of cooling magic down her spine. The feel of moon-spun silk wrapped around his hands. A wonder at whether she is as cold as she appears, or as warm as life normally is. If she tastes like winter, or something else. 

“You’re staring.”

Eir’asha has put down her book, washed out cold sea eyes focused in his direction. Just in his direction. Not on him. She does that often; the staring past him, through him. Like she’s not entirely on the same plane he is.

She’s real, but not quite all there, most times. He’s remembering, slowly, that he is still alive and still a doctor and the woman in front of him has all the markers of a very unwell mage. 

_ Abomination _ , he thinks, then stops. An abomination would be  _ normal _ . That’s what usually happens with unwell mages like Eir’asha. 

But he’s been here at least half a year. Eir’asha has been like this for far, far longer, he suspects. 

.

.

.

_ Dreamer _ . 

He’s not really sure why he didn’t piece it together sooner. The fading in and out, the not quite here, the way she looks through him. Eir’asha is a dreamer. A real one. Not  _ sominari _ , or whatever the Tevene call them. Not like that half-elven boy in Kirkwall. Here is the true elvhen version. 

Fadewalker, that’s another name. She said she was at Kinloch, but he can’t quite see how. Had the Templars known there was a dreamer who can fadewalk easy as she breathes, she would have been rendered Tranquil, if not killed. 

He remembers something ripping in his chest, before the cave, before Eir’asha. Justice had told him the Veil had been sundered and the Fade was pouring into the world. It hurt, mostly, and soon followed with that false Calling. He can’t really recall much beyond the pain and the dark. 

It had knocked him to the ground, when it happened. Eir’asha, Fadewalker, Dreamer; how had it affected her? Did it, even? He’s not entirely convinced they’re in Thedas, but they both were at some point 

And Eir’asha is not well. 

.

.

.

Something changes as winter dawns. 

Eir’asha has been in and out more than usual, of late. Something’s happening, he gathers, and while the curiosity bites at him, he does manage to keep it swallowed down. It helps that she’s often gone when it presses the hardest against his teeth. 

“Healer,” she says. She’s standing just before him, the washed out pale highlighted in something akin to worry. It's the first she's identified him like that, and he wants to question how she knows, but something is clearly not right. 

Eir'asha hesitates but a moment, and the words come out like they're a strange and foreign thing.

"I need your help," she says. 

It’s been a year, by his reckoning, since Eir’asha found him in that cave. She’s made Snowball for him, humored him with the library and the many times he’s tried to watch her sew her magic into impossible spells. 

This is the first she’s tried to include him in anything. 

She needs a healer, though, and she’s worried. Eir’asha herself seems unharmed, and her silver-white robes show no signs of blood. He doubts she’s here because of any recognition of whatever mental and emotional instability he’s suspected her of. 

Which means there is someone else here. 

He nods and makes to follow her, but again Eir’asha hesitates. It makes her seem so young, but does nothing to erase how out of place that timidity is. 

Something is very wrong. 

“This may hurt,” she warns. 

“Hurt me?”

She nods, slowly turning away. “This wasn’t made for your kind.”

.

.

.

_ Your kind _ turns out to mean human. 

He should have known, really. He’s always been an interloper here in this floating palace of eternal winter, with the intricate stonework and magic that only elvhen structures are known for. 

What Eir’asha had been referring to, though, that is something he’d sincerely wished he’d never see again. 

The hall she leads him to is far grander than the hovel in Kirkwall’s alienage. Darker, too, for this is a place that sees winter and more winter. Never the hot summers rolling in off the Waking Sea, sticking salt and magic alike down his spine. It’s the crisp clean scent of cold, not the ashy metal mixed with human suffering that was Lowtown. 

And there is no Merrill here, fluttering about like a nervous little bug trapped inside. Eir’asha is nervous in her own way, but there is no way she knows his associations with the thing behind her. 

This one is larger than the fractured one Merrill had so fiercely hoarded. It looks different, too. On either side are two elven women wearing branching crowns and flowing gowns, their metal hands holding up the perfect pane of glass between them. 

_ Eluvian _ . 

He takes a deep breath. He’d hoped, prayed, that that damned mirror of Merrill’s was the last of its kind. Or the last he saw, at the very least.

Yet here is one in pristine condition. 

“You know what this is?” Eir’asha asks.

He nods. “The last one was broken.”

“Many were,” she says, “after the Betrayal.”

For a moment, he thinks of the Dales and Halamshiral. He stops just short of saying it; Eir’asha is no Dalish elf, nor is she one of the forgotten and abused of the alienages. 

Betrayal, he thinks, means the  _ original  _ betrayal: Fen’Harel and the fall of Arlathan. 

“This one’s not tainted,” he says. It’s somewhere between a question and an observation. Eir’asha gives him an arched eyebrow for it, but lets it go without comment. 

She steps up to the mirror, and for the first time he notices the staves leaning against the left side. Eir’asha passes him one of made of a dark, rich heartwood, crowned by a solitary orb at the top that resonates with the gentle healing magics of Creation. For herself , she keeps a pale gold and green staff that looks suspiciously like dragonbone and the Fade. 

Once armed, Eir’asha runs a slender hand across the center of the glass, tracing a rune upon the surface in shimmering magic. It sends out ripples in the mirror, the glass undulating like water until it settles into a cloudy image.

“How dangerous is this?” he asks. Splendid time to have a shred of self-preservation, he knows. He’s spent a year in an unknown magical palace filled with all manner of monsters made by an elven sorceress who can do the impossible and not once has he tried to run away. Common sense has always been something of a fairweather friend for him, this last decade or so. 

“For me, not at all,” she says, turning to look back at him. “This was made by my people for us alone. For you, it will hurt, but I promise you will be safe.”

.

.

.

_ Hurt _ was putting it lightly. 

It feels like his skin is too tight, his magic compressing itself to the point it feels like his bones might shatter if he moves. And his head. Maker his head. If only it would split open to release some of the pressure. If only, if only. 

Eir’asha fills his vision, frozen sea eyes set against snowy white skin and starlight hair. Cold hands on either side of his face; cold and solid. Something real. He blinks a bit, and it still hurts, but he can see a bit more when she moves away. 

There’s trees, everywhere, wherever they are. A bricked path meanders all over the place, and he has the feeling that there's no ground beneath it. More floating structures; the elves did like dramatic architecture, didn’t they?

And mirrors. 

Sweet Andraste, how he’d wished Merrill’s eluvian would be the last he ever saw. Even allowing Eir’asha’s, that’s only two. 

But no, there are dozens and dozens of eluvians here. Some broken, some dark, and a precious few with the faint light like the one they’d just walked through. 

“Where—”

“An’bel’ven,” she says. “The Crossroads.”  
“Do all eluvians go here?”

She shakes her head. “Most do, but a few went elsewhere.”

“Does it always hurt like this?”

“For humans,” she says. “It may be worse because we are coming from the far shores of Man’mi’durgan.”

“Where?”

“The Amaranthine,” Eir’asha says, absently. She’s already turned away from him, looking for the next mirror, he assumes.

He’d suspected, yes, that they were not in Thedas. But on the other side of the Amaranthine? No one who attempts reaching the far shore has ever come back. No one. Yet here is Eir’asha, who has clearly made the journey at least three times, and he’s...kneeling, but still here in this in-between. They’re going back to Thedas, he thinks. 

“We’re going to Eir’vhera’an,” she explains, when he’s back on his feet and she’s leading him through the forest of mirrors. “I don’t know the human name for it, but it’s near the Fereldan-Orlesian border.”

She’s more alive, here, he realizes. It’s easier to focus on her than on the pain in his head, and she’s brighter here. Nearly glowing. Eir’asha looks like she belongs here, like this is her natural environment. For all he knows, it is. 

A stray thought crosses the back of his mind. She’s better here, and he’d stay in this painful foggy land, just to see her smile and it not be a monster’s smile.

Any god willing to listen, please help him. 

.

.

.

She leads him through a mirror what feels like an age later. It drops them someplace colder than her palace, but just as deep in winter. Near the border, she’d said, so near the Frostbacks. Very nearly in them, if the way his ears pop is anything to go by. 

It’s an elven ruin of some sort, that she leads him to. Partially swallowed by the earth, one wall is mountain and there’s an opening that shows a valley dotted with lights. The Orlesian side of the border, he decides, if the faint buildings he can see in the distance are anything to go by. 

“Over here,” Eir’asha calls him back. She’s kneeling in the sheltered side of the ruin, by a makeshift bed holding an injured elf. Male, this one, with a mop of dark hair and the sharp features that only elves can look good with. 

“Do you know what happened to him?” he asks, taking a position on the elf’s other side. 

“He crossed someone he shouldn’t have,” Eir’asha says, as if that explains it all. It does, in a way. _Crossed someone he shouldn’t have_. He hopes this wounded elf at least remembers what he’s done to cross whoever it was. “Can you help him?”  
Here in Thedas, Eir’asha isn’t nearly as bright as she is in the Crossroads, or even in her faraway palace. She’s muted, almost, but she seems all the more real. Perhaps it’s just the worry. Whoever this elf is, he means something important to her.

That shouldn’t hurt, he thinks, but it does all the same.

.

.

.

“You really care about him, don’t you?” he asks the next morning. This is going to be a multi-day affair, he thinks. Whatever happened to this elf, the only comparison he can think of is being stomped on by a pride demon. 

Which, with a tear in the Veil, may be exactly what happened. 

Or maybe not. It doesn’t hurt to be here, the way he’d remembered it being. Not the way he’d expected. Maybe it’s just the lack of Justice talking. 

Eir’asha just looks at him silently.

.

.

.

“He’s my uncle,” she explains, a couple of days later. The healing has been slow-going. Magical patients are often difficult, and cross-race healings are notorious for rejection. It’s been a long, long time since he’s had a patient’s own magic try to push his out, but this one has been the worst of the lot. It’s almost an aggressive thing, the way the unknown elf’s magic tries to block his.

“Your uncle?” he asks. He’s not sure what he had been expecting, only that this wasn’t it. Eir’asha, with family. Of course she has family, she’s alive and elves have families just as humans do. That doesn’t make it any less strange. Eir’asha has always seemed eternal, almost, and absolutely impossible. 

Yet here she is with family. 

She nods. She’s leaning against the opening, nearly blending in with the winter landscape beyond. Her arms are crossed over her chest like she’s trying to hold herself together. Frail, that’s the word. Eir’asha looks frail. 

“I haven’t much left,” she says quietly. “I’d rather not lose anyone else.”

.

.

.

He’d thought she meant family, and maybe she did. All he knows is that he’d finished with the day’s healing and had sought her out to tell her the prognosis. 

And found Eir’asha standing just outside the ruin surrounded by dead Templars.

One jerks himself up. It’s Kinloch, Kirkwall, every dark thing he only half-remembers. He’s reaching for his stave, mind running through the unfamiliar spells made to break and kill. 

Eir’asha simply raises her hand and closes a fist. The Templar  _ shatters _ . It’s like watching crystal glass break into a million pieces, a sickly glowing red scattered across the ice and snow. 

There’s a magic there that he knows, and he reaches down towards a piece of singing crimson to take a closer look. 

“Don’t touch them,” she warns. “They’ve done something they shouldn’t have.”

.

.

.

It’s lyrium, he realizes later. Something’s wrong though, and the bile rises up at the back of his throat. 

He knows what this is. 

Justice made things blurry, those years they were together. There’s in fact entire years he doesn’t remember, and what little he can clearly recall is mostly made up of things he wishes he didn’t. 

Like that cursed Thaig.

Like the wreckage that tiny shard did to the Tethras house. 

Like what that much larger piece did to Meredith, and by extension to all of Kirkwall. 

They’ve gone and consumed it. 

He tries to focus on his patient, just to keep his mind off of it. 

The Templars actually went and  _ consumed it _ . Even after Meredith, even after seeing what that Maker forsaken poison did. He can’t find the words to describe how phenomenally  _ stupid _ that is. So much for the distinct lack of fools; storm magic has never been his strong suit but by all the verses in the Chant, he wants to do it.

What kind of person looks at that and thinks it’s a good idea? 

.

.

.

Eir’asha is less worried, by now. Her uncle has, despite the problems with healing, started to recover remarkably well. She’s relaxed a bit, now that she knows he’s safe, and has taken to keeping a vigilant eye on the path leading up. 

“Did they do this?” he asks, finally. “Those things.”

She shakes her head.

“Are there more of them?”

“Not as many as there could be,” she says, and there’s a vicious edge to it. That monstrous smile is slinking its way back into her expression.

“You’ve been killing them?” he guesses. 

Eir’asha looks at him, then. It’s eerie, in the twilight. Eir’asha. Snow woman, here to suck the life out. Grandmother’s stories lean ever closer. He’d thought Thedas made her more real, but magic is as magic does, and Eir’asha is unlike anything.

“They killed Swan,” she says, finally, “so I killed them.”

.

.

.

Eventually her uncle wakes up. 

He hears the cracking of joints while still half asleep himself, and the sound jolts him awake. The now concious elf, however, has already made it over to Eir’asha, and the two are hissing at each other in rapid fire Elvhen. 

“Is’ba’isa’ma’lin. ‘Ma ia’ma’lin. Is’shals.”

Whatever her uncle has said has made Eir’asha look like she’s bitten something bitter. “Is’dalem alas’en,” she says. “Is’esays geron?”

The last bit she says is quirked up, like a question. The cadence is unlike any form of the language he can think of. His Dalish is limited largely to Velanna, and the chopped up form mixed with Common in the alienages is largely divorced from its roots. What they’re speaking is strange, and closer to the ancient texts in Kinloch, maybe. 

Whatever they’re arguing is resolved in a quieter exchange. 

.

.

.

“Healer,” the uncle corners him later, when Eir’asha has stepped out to collect water. “I believe I owe you thanks.”

“I’m a healer,” he says, sort of shrugging it off. Possibly ancient elves. Eir’asha is unsettling enough, when she wants to be. This one is older, for sure. Older and possibly more powerful, if that’s even possible. “This is what I do.”

The uncle shakes his head. “I meant with Da’vuna, though I guess I owe you for not letting me die, too.”

“Is that her name?” There’s something at the back of his mind about curiosity and cats. Common sense, though. It is a fair weather friend. 

“No,” the uncle says, “not exactly. She hasn’t told you yet? I am Sulahn, by the way.”

“Anders,” he says, without thinking. Not even Eir’asha has that name, yet here he is giving it to her uncle. He’s not even sure when he started thinking of himself like that again. He’s not even sure when he stopped. “Could I ask what happened? I don’t normally have patients in your condition. Or if I did, there were more Templars involved.”

Or just Hawke. Or Fenris. There was that one time a Coterie kid wandered in muttering something about Aveline. 

But usually it was Templars. 

“A spot of family troubles,” Sulahn says, grinning. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “My brother has always had a wolf’s temper, and he’s found himself a woman who hits harder than he ever did.”

Another uncle, then. And an aunt? Eir’asha has gone from solitary to having a whole family in such a short amount of time. There’s no mention of parents, is all, and Anders has the distinct impression that Eir’asha is an orphan of some sort. 

She was at Kinloch, after all. They’re all orphans, once the Circle takes them.

“She must hit like a pride demon,” he says, voice flat. 

Sulahn looks like he’s about to laugh. There’s a joke there, maybe, but Anders doesn’t get it even though he’s the one who said it. “Might I ask a favor of you, healer?” 

“Of course,” he says, even as he’s fairly certain this is a very bad idea. Sulahn is  _ off _ in the same way Eir’asha is. Not of this world. But unlike Eir’asha, Sulahn is in full control of himself. When he looks at someone, it’s straight on, not through the way his niece does. 

Sulahn is far, far more dangerous than Eir’asha. 

Elves and magics older than time. The things whispered about in the night round a fire. The stories Velanna mourned, the stories Merrill fought for. 

“Would you please stay with Da’vuna?” 

Of all the things he’d expected, that was somewhere near the bottom. The very bottom, if he’s honest. 

“She was raised by humans,” Sulahn explains. “Our family is, well, complicated. It’s for the better if she stays clear of us. A human is more likely to succeed in that than one of us.”

“She said she was at Kinloch,” he says. “How? You’re not Dalish, and you’re not city.”

Sulahn’s smiles slow. It’s not the same predatory edge Eir’asha has, but it’s a close thing. “We’re not, no. All you need to know is that when she was a babe in swaddling, she ended up in the custody of your Kinloch. And there she stayed, until a decade or so ago. Then she found me, and from there we are here.”

.

.

.

“Anders,” he says, when the sun has set behind snow-capped peaks and the moon peeking out of clouds. Eir’asha stands lonely near the edge of the cliff, staring out across the valley and all the tiny pinpricks of light. Sulahn left just after dinner, after another tense exchange in Elven.

She looks at him now, over her shoulder. So small, she is, so out of this world. Before he’d left, Sulahn had explained what  _ da’vuna _ meant: Little Star. It’s appropriate. Charming and sweet, and so very, very accurate. 

“You asked my name,” he clarifies. “It’s Anders.”

“Anders?” she says, sounding it out. She makes a face. “That’s what you are. How can it be who you are?”

“What?”

“You’re that Anderfels boy that everyone was always complaining about,” she says. In Kinloch, she means. 

Kinloch. Every time he thinks he’s escaped that place, it just drags him back. 

“I lost my original name a long time ago,” he says. “I’ve been Anders for so long, it’s all I have.”

Eir’asha looks at him for a long moment before nodding. “The name I was born with was chosen for a different me. At Kinloch they called me Neria Surana, and Swan called me Nerry.”

Swan and Nerry. That. He knows that. He knows he know that. It had to have been at Kinloch, but Maker help him he just can’t quite remember. He should, because this is before Justice and before the spirit’s interference with his memory. 

It was just too long ago. 

Nearly fifteen years, now.

“Who was Swan?” he asks. Swan has come up so many times, and it always touches something just out reach. “Was Swan at Kinloch too?”

Eir’asha— _ Neria _ , he reminds himself—looks away. There’s grief, there, at the downturned corners of her mouth and the crestfallen slump of her shoulders. 

“You would have called her Sonny,” she says, quiet.

Sonny. 

_ Oh _ . 

Oh, Andraste. 

Sonny. 

_ Solona Amell _ . 

Hawke’s cousin. 

He remembers her easily; she and Hawke could have passed for twins if they’d known each other. But where Hawke is all sharp edges and violence, Sonny had been soft and quiet. Another Spirit Healer, she’d been Wynne’s favourite student. 

Sonny Amell, who always had an elven shadow. 

“Where is—” he stops himself before finishing. Neria carries a grief like she’s been ripped apart.  _ Oh _ . 

_ They killed Swan _ , she’d said. The Templars. 

Anders sinks down to the ground. Justice blurs most everything, from the battle at Vigil’s Keep to the cave where Hawke left him. Just bits and bobs stick out. He knows there is a war between Templars and mages, and he knows it is his fault. 

He hadn’t wanted this. He hadn’t wanted  _ war _ . He’s a healer, not a battlemage. Justice had been the one who called for war, and Justice had been the one who knew what to do. 

War comes with death. It comes with dozens of dead children in the Gallows, and it comes with old friends lost forever. 

And the Templars. The Templars, who despite their emblem being the Sword of Mercy know nothing of the virtue.

All Anders had wanted was a safe space for mages to be mages. Where they wouldn’t be hunted, where they wouldn’t be caged. A place where someone like Sonny, who had been hurt in the worst of ways, didn’t have to be afraid anymore. A place where someone like Neria could explore her power without a sword at her throat. 

A place where he could have a pretty girl and the freedom to shoot lightning at fools. 

A home. That was it. Just a home. 

Justice was a spirit, was the only problem. And spirits do not understand nuance. All Justice knew was that mages were treated with extreme injustice, and that the Templars could not be reasoned with. 

All he knows is the wreckage.

Neria settles down beside him. It’s so hard, thinking of her by a name, thinking of her as the little shadow who followed Solona around outside of classes. She’s been Eir’asha, ancient and dangerous. She’s both, if Sulahn is to be believed. 

She’s both, if his memory is to be believed. She’s the same girl from Kinloch and the same sorceress who can make life out of nothing.

But right now, she’s warm and real, pressed against his side like she belongs there. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says, eyes focused on the horizon and the large shadows in the sky. “They turned the Aeonar into something it was never meant to be. Once they took her there, that was the end.”

Deep breaths. What was it she’d said?  _ Tel’ar din _ .  _ I’m not dead _ . He’s not sure why that’s a comfort right now; alive comes with repercussions and fallout. But it is a comfort all the same. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

“In many ways,” she says, and again he thinks she means something bigger than current events. Neither Dalish nor city;  _ ancient _ is what he’d thought her when she found him, and it rises up now to remind him of all the stories. Eir’asha. Snow woman, a lost soul of a lost kingdom. 

“What was it supposed to be, then?”

She tilts her head at him like she doesn’t quite understand. “Which time?” she asks, then settles on a choice. “When I was born, it was supposed to be a new dawn. Peace, after a long war. When I left Kinloch, it should have been Sonny and me both. A different dawn, and a different peace after a different war.”

“Peace,” he says. “That’s all any of us wanted, isn’t it?”

She nods. “It could still come.”

She sounds so sure. What is that hope like? Templars consuming red lyrium, war raging across the continent, possibly a hole ripped into the Veil between the realms. All of that, and she still sounds  _ hopeful _ . 

And he believes her. 

“Don’t you want to go home?” he asks. That everwinter palace is, despite the inherent creepiness, rather...no, it’s not charming or sweet. It does suit her, however much it makes her more elvhen in the worst ways. 

“That’s Uncle Sulahn’s,” she says. “Mamae is from there, too. I’m from here, like Mama.”

She was brighter in the Crossroads, and more alive here in Thedas. So somewhere that meets both criteria, of a weak Veil and in Thedas. And that can keep her away from her family, as Sulahn requested. He's already thinking of it, Maker help him. 

“You want to stay?” 

She nods. “Don’t you?”

“Perhaps on the other side of the border,” he says. _Orlesians_. It’s their Chantry and their Templars.

“Which border?” 

“Ferelden,” he answers, quickly. Fadewalker, he remembers just a bit too late. Of course she’d take  _ border _ the way she did.

“I haven’t been there in years,” she says a bit absently.

“Neither have I.”

Eir’asha, Neria,  _ Nerry _ , that’s right. She nods slowly, like she’s thinking it over, her attention always on the horizon. 

“Home,” she finally says. “I’d like that.”

He finds himself nodding along with her. “Home sounds good.”

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly thought I would never finish this. Without prodding, I likely wouldn't have. Without prodding, I also probably wouldn't have posted it. I'm still on the fence about that one, but here it is.
> 
> Some background: Neria Surana and Solona Amell are the default names for the female elven and human mages in Origins. The versions you will see in any of my writing have been developed in collaboration with @sarsaparillia. And Sulahn, I swear, is technically a canon character. Canon just uses a different name and so I have no idea how to tag for him (we developed him by taking two bits of lore that didn't quite fit into the overall narrative of DA and mashed them together to make them fit).
> 
> I am also fully aware that any and all Elvhen used in here is likely a hot mess, but it's a cipher not a language and has no grammar to speak of.


End file.
